Hesabu 13

Men sent to scout out the land of Canaan

¹Then the LORD spoke to Moses. He said, ²“Send men to scout out the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites. From each ancestral tribe send one man, and each of them is to be a leader among them.” ³So Moses sent them out from the wilderness of Paran, as the LORD had commanded. All of them were men who were heads among the Israelites. ⁴These are their names: from the tribe of Reuben, Shammua son of Zaccur. ⁵From the tribe of Simeon, Shaphat son of Hori. ⁶From the tribe of Judah, Caleb son of Jephunneh. ⁷From the tribe of Issachar, Igal son of Joseph. ⁸From the tribe of Ephraim, Hoshea son of Nun. ⁹From the tribe of Benjamin, Palti son of Raphu. ¹⁰From the tribe of Zebulun, Gaddiel son of Sodi. ¹¹From the tribe of Joseph, that is, from the tribe of Manasseh, Gaddi son of Susi. ¹²From the tribe of Dan, Ammiel son of Gemalli. ¹³From the tribe of Asher, Sethur son of Michael. ¹⁴From the tribe of Naphtali, Nahbi son of Vophsi. ¹⁵From the tribe of Gad, Geuel son of Machi. ¹⁶These are the names of the men Moses sent to scout out the land. And Moses gave Hoshea son of Nun the name Joshua. ¹⁷When Moses sent them to scout out the land of Canaan, he told them, “Go up this way into the Negev, and go on up into the hill country, ¹⁸and see what the land is like, and whether the people who live in it are strong or weak, few or many, ¹⁹what kind of land they live in, whether it is good or bad, and what kind of towns they live in, whether they are open camps or fortified cities, ²⁰and whether the soil is rich or poor, and whether there are trees in it or not. Be courageous, and bring back some of the fruit of the land.” It was the season of the first ripe grapes. ²¹So they went up and scouted out the land from the wilderness of Zin as far as Rehob, near Lebo-hamath.^{a 22}They went up through the Negev and came to Hebron, where Ahiman, Sheshai and Talmai, the descendants of Anak, lived. (Hebron had been built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.)^{b 23}When they came to the Valley of Eshcol, they cut off a branch with a single cluster of grapes, and two of them carried it on a pole. They also took some of the pomegranates and figs. ²⁴That place was called the Valley of Eshcol because of the cluster of grapes the Israelites cut there. ²⁵After forty days they came back from scouting out the land. ²⁶They came back to Moses and Aaron and the whole congregation of the Israelites at Kadesh in the wilderness of Paran. They gave their report to them and to the whole congregation, and showed them the fruit of the land. ²⁷They gave Moses this account: “We went into the land you sent us to. It does flow with milk and honey, and here is its fruit. ²⁸But the people living in the land are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw the descendants of Anak there. ²⁹The Amalekites live in the land of the Negev. The Hittites, the Jebusites and the Amorites live in the hill country, and the Canaanites live by the sea and along the Jordan.” ³⁰Then Caleb quieted the people in front of Moses and said, “We must go up and take possession of it, for we are surely strong enough to conquer it.” ³¹But the men who had gone up with him said, “We cannot attack these people, because they are too strong for us.” ³²So they spread a bad report among the Israelites about the land they had scouted, saying, “The land we went through to scout out is a land that eats up those who live in it. All the people we saw there are men of huge size.^{c 33}We saw the Nephilim there, the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim. To ourselves we looked like grasshoppers, and that is how we looked to them.”^d